C.V. Wedgwood

AWKWARDLY for C.V. Wedgwood, she lived some hundreds of years after the English civil war (1642-48), an event in which she was passionately interested. Describing how the balance of power shifted from the monarch to Parliament was in some ways the easier part of her task: there was plenty of documentation, records of speeches, details of legislation and so on. Her problem was to try to see the era through the minds of the royalists and Cromwell's Roundheads, who took their differences to the battleground. Her remedy was to work out the battles on paper, then put her imagination to work as she tramped around the battlefields, if possible in the season when a battle took place. The summers of the civil war were typically English, she noted, with cold windy days and wet evenings. Ice was on the ground in some places in August. The war itself was fought in the main by “talented amateurs”. Cromwell himself had no previous experience of warfare.

The two books on the civil war she published in the 1950s, “The King's Peace” and “The King's War”, were much praised for bringing the period alive. Her numerous books covering other times also showed she had a novelist's talent for entering into the character of the giants of history. Miss Wedgwood rather envied the fiction writer. While emphasising the importance of sticking to the known facts, she argued that an historian had “the same task as that of a creative artist”, that is “to illuminate the human soul”.

For many people an interest in the past was first sparked off by one of Miss Wedgwood's books. Earl Russell, a British historian, recalled that when he was eight he happened to pick up one of her books belonging to his parents. “To my great surprise, the first time I put it down voluntarily was when I had read it from cover to cover.”

Not all academics have been so kind. In the eyes of some, her very readability made her suspect. The lucid A.J.P. Taylor was similarly knocked, as is Norman Stone. Being “popular” can be an insulting term, especially when an historian's books sell in great numbers, as Miss Wedgwood's did.

The friendly dead

Being a woman did not help in a discipline dominated by men. As “C.V.” she felt comfortably anonymous, although within her circle everyone knew her as Veronica. Coming from a “good” family--the Wedgwood potters--she quietly supported suitable causes in music and literature. She gained many literary prizes and other honours. She had a long relationship with Princeton. She was made a “dame”, the female equivalent of a knighthood, a title she hardly used, and was charmed to be a member of the Order of Merit, a rare gift of the queen. But she was, she said, most at home in “the friendly company of the dead”.

They could be difficult friends. Apart from arousing small jealousies, the profession of history inevitably attracts controversy. There is the Thomas Carlyle view: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Tolstoy, though, had little use for great men: he believed that history simply marched on inexorably. Marxist historians, an influential group this century, prefer to view history as a series of class struggles, and some felt that Miss Wedgwood was not concerned sufficiently with the causes of events.

The power of written history worried Veronica Wedgwood. In an essay she noted that it had made and unmade states. It had given courage to the oppressed, but it had also justified aggression. The populariser could be upright and learned, but he could also be a Goebbels. “Historians should always draw morals,” she concluded. If they did not, if they claimed that history should be written “without prejudice”, a villain would use the history to delude the public.

As a moralist, Miss Wedgwood inclined to the “great men” approach, but she was equally concerned about the fate of “little” people. Whatever the gains of the civil war, she wrote, they were a disaster for those “who had worked and saved to maintain their small property” and were plundered by the opposing armies. Moreover, she was constantly wary of what was great in men. She wrote a book about Thomas Wentworth, a 17th century Englishman who was sent to Ireland to try to sort out its troubles, a rough road many have taken since. She depicted him as a “sincere, brave and able man”. More than 20 years later, papers of the Wentworth family turned up that changed her view. She wrote another book in which Wentworth was shown as unscrupulous and greedy.

The emergence of new material is always a headache for historians, and not only for those delving into the distant past. Documents disclosed by the opening of Soviet archives and though America's freedom of information legislation mean that contemporary history is continually being revised. Is this embarrassing for historians? It was not for Miss Wedgwood. “The stuff of history is by no means coherent,” she wrote. “No agreed consensus has yet emerged, nor ever will.”

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